


Status: Replay?

by RadioCybertron



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Cadence - Freeform, Drabble Collection, M/M, Other, lyrical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 08:00:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5156255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RadioCybertron/pseuds/RadioCybertron
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1. a modulation or inflection of the voice.<br/>2. {MUSIC}-a sequence of notes or chords comprising the close of a musical phrase</p>
<p>Half forgotten memories and times and places, wayside friends and places. All wrapped up in one space. Proceed apace?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He sees him when he recharges, a dreamless form like a wordless song. A melody he repeats and repeats on a loop, but never gets tired of.

He hears it like a wordless chord, a refrain that thunders through his frame. It’s a symphony and a cacophony all at once, and he comes back for more. They were friends once, visitors to the same clubs and the same dives. They had shared energon and secrets, and on more than one memorable occasion, themselves. Solid and stolid on the outside, his partner would come undone like a beautiful storm alone with him. Once upon a revolution, he even worked as part of the then forming special operatives division of the newly formed Decepticon Movement. Refining and defining a new movement?   
  
That was his **beat** , sweetspark. Didn’tcha know it?  
  
Or maybe that's because he forgot how to show it.  
  
But all movements begin and end, sometimes with a soft fade but with him- it was a sudden stop. A drop. That ended when Praxus faded to silence, a million civilian voices just gone with the hammer’s blow of a bomb- no aplomb, and a mad-mech that started with a visionary’s grasp for justice. The guilt had nearly eaten him alive, no matter how hard he'd tried to strive. More so than the epidemic of scraplets it had caused, a million series of lifetimes on pause. It’d been his hands that planted those explosives, claws dripping with corrosives-under the guise of a mobilizing militia. He’d thought he’d gone into this with optics wide open, but instead they’d managed to pull it over him, the greatest Con ever.   
  
Wasn't that just clever?  
  
And for a gutter-mech from the deepest parts of Polyhex, that was unforgivable. Predators apex, upon them a hex. You didn’t con a con-mech. From there on, joining the Autobrats had been as much a choice of pride as a choice of conscience. A million unheard responses, weighed in recharges- deactivations and nightmare, a constant barrage. The screams and silence of those he’d off-lined (as he’d started questioning EVERYTHING after that point ) a new point defined- a whirling maelstrom of if, ands, buts and what-ifs that he had no answer for.  
  
It's a point that still remains sore.

He had dropped everything when he left the grasp and claws of the Cons, a faint echo of fractured symmetry- of what used to be. 

  
Trust hadn’t come easy, and the Autobrats had learned hard the ways of reason and treason through energon and sacrifice. He’d worked his way up from the bottom to the top, slid back and then worked again. Praxus’s silence still screams in his mind, and recharge doesn’t come easy. Smiles on the outside hint at horrors on the inside, but that’s okay because the Autobots don’t like to look behind mirrors and his visor reflects  _everything._  
  
They clash on the battlefield like titans, grappling hand in hand. He revels in the closeness, the heat of the other’s frame. It fans the fantasies that he holds on to, the memories of what was that keeps him warm when doubts and screams render him frozen. He takes each blow like a caress, desire and need blossoming through like frost fractals on frames. Time and distance has not lessened the bloom in his spark, or the revulsion in his processor.   
  
It doesn’t help that he’s always zeroed on by the carrier mech in battle, tentacles reaching and winding around plating to bind. More often than not, he’s face to face-plate with the mech, their hands grasping wrists. He sees it in his recharge often enough, but it never ends the way he wants. What he wants he’ll never get with peace at his door and the mech at his side. So, each night he’ll hear the beats from Protihex to Polyhex and feel the mech against him. Warmth to warmth. Frame to frame. Tendrils and tentacles and cables plugged in to trade pulse and data, emotion and devotion. Each night he’ll feel the recharge flux come on, and the little niggling command in the corner of his HUD- a command to commandeer and copy.  
  
_Status: Replay?_  
  
And once again the past will become the present for just another day.


	2. Status: Pause

He hears in technicolor but sees in blacks and whites. A paradigm of paradoxes. 

He was chaos refined and redefined, a mech made of many colors that shifts in dimming lights and untold nights. He captured his interest the moment they met. Dips and dives in different cities. Club to club, band to band and soon hand to hand they touched. Five symbiotes, five reasons to say no and say go, to leave this decision unfinished and untouched.  
  
But like a note, hovering in the air and waiting for the crescendo to end- he is and was caught and wavering, quavering at touch and sound. The mech enchanted him, in the oldest sense of the word. Ensnared and bewared, all in the same electric and eclectic touch.   
  
He wanted more.  
  
That voice that soared high above a crowd, prepared and un-cowed and it was his, all his to capture and and kiss. Unparalleled bliss. They sang every song and ballad from the tallest Tower spire, to the deepest Kaonite mire. A duet of perfect and utter harmony.   
  
Until the city fell   
  
He should have seen it coming. There had been doubt creeping about in the visage of his lover, he’d seen it linger and hover. Though he’d thought he’d banished all traces.   
  
Too late. He had seen the faces. And in that one moment in the absence of sound, he lost the only thing that he had ever found- that might mean more to him that the movement and it’s traces. A mirror shattered and scattered, reflecting not what it seems- only lost hopes and dreams.   
  
He lost everything.  
  
His processor and spark, betrayal made it’s mark and he cast the interloper out as fast as he could. He knew they’d meet again. opposite lines to stand behind and defined. This time, oh this time he would be ready and steady with claws to grasp and clasp and to make sure the hurt would never come again.  
  
But it does.  
  
Battle after battle, plating rattles- unknown pain and unknown gain. Glimpses of each other, time cannot erase a known frame and a known face. And soon hate turns to ache, and loneliness returns. A bitter, dark pillow to swallow. Oh, how he wishes he could follow. Interrogation, an irritation- to a processor he knows inside and out, and what it’ll spout. He’ll recharge alone, solid and as cold as stone and replay the memories until they fade- a painful cavalcade of things left forgotten.  
  
And he’ll pretend he has just cause, eyeing the command on his HUD:  
  
 _Status: Pause?_  
  


A suitable cover, to wait and hover? Or to finally push play, and remember the day- when they used to be.


End file.
